The career path to principal traditionally started in the classroom but, in a major shift, the Catholic education system in Sydney's west says their new school leaders may not be teachers but managers from the private sector.
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The Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, which runs 56 primary and 22 secondary schools, is building a new school on a greenfield site in Marsden Park, which will be vastly different from existing schools, starting with the principal.
The executive director of schools, Greg Whitby, said the principal of its newest school would not necessarily be a career teacher, but rather someone who was a "bit of an entrepreneur" who will "make connections and manage relationships".
"We are not talking about someone like the CFO of BHP, but it could be someone from the tertiary sector, private education providers, the coaching industry," Mr Whitby said.
"We are looking for people who understand the nature of learning and teaching but we are not limiting ourselves to someone who may have just been a principal for several years. There might be people who have been working in related industries."
He said despite the "rapid pace of social change", too many schools still conformed to "old school values".
"We've got to look outside the box and unpick many of the staples of life at school," Mr Whitby said.
These old school values include sorting students by age rather than stage of learning, allocating a single teacher to a single class and the traditional 9am to 3pm school day, Mr Whitby said.
Mr Whitby said several of their schools had already made major changes to the way their classrooms looked and felt.
"We have had parents questioning what we have done at our other schools that have transformed, and the first comment from them is 'it doesn't look like the school I went to'," Mr Whitby said.
"But what I would say to them is the skills sets required for young people now are very different from what they were when schools were first designed and we need to transform and meet the needs of the next generations.
"We are not doing this as an education experiment, we are going to bring the best we know about contemporary learning and teaching."
The new Marsden Park school, to be called St Luke's Catholic College, will open in stages from next year and will eventually cater for 2000 students. It will start educating children as young as two and will go to at least year 12, although possibly further with industry partnerships.
"Everyone is calling for improvement but no one is calling for transformation," Mr Whitby said.
"We have been trying to improve schools for 50 years. The issue is we need a new model."
The Catholic education office has been working with the internationally renowned expert in learning spaces, Stephen Heppell to develop the new school.
The British academic has helped designed innovative schools around the world and has worked with the NSW Department of Education on its new school planned for the former UTS Kuring-gai campus.
As well as open plan learning spaces with small and large screens placed around the rooms, traditional staff rooms at St Luke's will be replaced with standing desks for teachers.
Rather than a traditional library, the school will have a communal learning space called The Hub, which will have a focus on informal learning and teaching and the school will be built around The Marketplace, a large covered space for learning and sport as well as community events.
